“What else are you supposed to do when you know there’s people in the house. You just can’t leave them there.”

Barker said he thought about his 6-year-old son and realizes now that he put himself in danger when he ran up to the house and pounded on the doors and the house until the occupants came out about 5 minutes later.

He’s just glad he was in the area, that he recognized his customers’ home.

There was a sketchy moment, he recalled, when the woman tried to go back into the house to save her bearded dragons.

“The husband and I had to stop her,” Barker said. A family cat was saved. The reptiles didn’t make it.

The Springfield Fire Rescue Division, on its Facebook page, blamed the fast moving fire that started at the front of the house on “the careless disposal of smoking materials.”

When the crew arrived with six pieces of apparatus, the porch had collapsed already. Crews were dispatched just before 3 a.m. on the report of a possible structure fire.